Tag Archives: teen author

Post navigation

As I mentioned on Monday, the Ch1Con team has spent this fall teaching two fantastic young writers about the publishing process in our inaugural mentorship program. The final step of this program is the release of an anthology featuring these up-and-coming young authors’ short stories (as well as some of our own). The anthology is called Twisted, because these stories all have some pretty killer plot twists (pun possibly intended).

The paperback and e-book editions of Twisted are available now for order on Blurb.com, and the e-book will be available soon on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and iBooks.

Today I am thrilled to host an excerpt from Emma Rose Ryan’s short story, “More than One Way to Make a Pencil”! This story is so unique and fun (with plenty of snark to boot). I adore it.

Besides being one of my best friends (and a founding member of Ch1Con), Emma is a freshman in college, studying Creative Writing somewhere in the Midwest. Her family and green tea notwithstanding, she loves stories more than anything in the world. Her primary obsessions are middle grade fiction and fairy tales. She also enjoys reading classic lit, YA romances, and modernizations/adaptations of any sort. She writes short stories, Tumblr posts, tweets, and MG fantasy novels. In her free time, Emma can be found on-or-near a stage, watching The West Wing, or petting a cat.

And now, without further ado: an excerpt from “More than One Way to Make a Pencil”! Until now, the protagonist has been sitting in class, bored out of her mind listening to her new teacher rant about plagiarism.

**********

I start to get tired of nodding along to first-day scare tactics. I’m at a new school now. I have too much to catch up with to waste time listening to things I already know. I decide to adopt Maze Boy’s disposition of polite disinterest and check on The Book. Up until this morning, I was on the fence about bringing It with me. It’s a dangerous thing to tote around on a good day, and I woke up with a premonition that today would not be a good day… which is why I slipped It in with my shiny-covered textbooks and unsharpened pencils. I need to work on my impulse control…

So, I decide to grab The Book and save myself from death by monotony. I fish around in my bag. I don’t find It. My fingers hover over where The Book should be. There’s nothing there. Teacher Lady suddenly seems to become ten times louder. My chest tightens.

It’s gone, I think. It’s finally left for good this time.

But then my thumb brushes against It and I can breathe again. I grab hold of Its spine… but there’s something wrong. The green leather is smooth, cold and… wet?

I pull the Book onto my desk, trying to maintain a vacant stare in my teacher’s direction.

I glance down to find something out of a nightmare. Water is leaking out of my magic book. Brine-scented, opaque seawater is squirting out from between the yellowed pages. Within a moment, the desk is saturated and water is pouring onto the tiled floor. Miniature Niagara Falls.

Crap.

My nameless teacher stops fabricating plagiarism horror stories. The girls behind me stop chatting. The kid in the back row stops popping his gum. I hear the boy beside me snap his pencil in half. Every eye is on my leaking book. On me. They ogle me in what seems to be shocked suspension. No one is moving. I see their minds trying to catch up with what they’re seeing.

**********

Aaand yeah. Want to read the rest of this magical story? You can check it out in Twisted, available now!

I’ve got a mound of homework to do. (I ended up falling asleep before I could get started on it last night.)

I’ve got classes to attend. (Yay weekdays.)

And 2K in NaNo to write. (Plus 500 words left over from yesterday’s 1K, because Once Upon a Time was more distracting than expected. By which I mean the special effects were even more terrible than expected. By which I mean: Yay. Once Upon a Time.)